Category Archives: university

“A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.” ― Brigitte Bardot

I am lounging on my bed, reading beside the window, the afternoon light illumining my pages and I feel a wave of drowsiness sweep over me. That is what happens when you have a large lunch and settle down to read quietly. It seems like the perfect time for a short nap. Suddenly my phone beeps and I am not in the present anymore but thrust into the murky waters of the past without any preamble. Photographs, like words, take you back in time but the effect is immediate and jarring, if it is something unpleasant.

In the photograph I see a place both intimately familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I am back at the university. In an instant I see myself as I was then and the past comes tumbling back. Old memories return, sad and joyous moments shared, fast friendships and swift betrayals, friends in unexpected places(amid ingratiating sycophants), having the most unlikeliest people stand by in their own way.Suddenly I am the same girl, who rarely spoke out of turn, even though it was not my nature to be silent when something unjust was being done.Thegirl who mostly kept her head down and worked, weighed down by the collective responsibility on her shoulders. The girl who was a dyed-in-the-wool romantic that crash landed into reality and didn’t know how to deal with that seismic shift. The girl who didn’t question the motives behind people’s actions and took everyone at their word. The girl who came out of that place with her soul undivided (if not intact) but her heart bruised (if not broken). I am that girl and yet, I feel strangely far removed from her.

I have always prided myself on cutting off something unpleasant as soon as I see it rearing its ugly head but truly moving on, closing the chapter in the book of life (clichéd I know) takes time, more time than I’d like to admit.There is no pain now, only a vague recollection of the past events and the memories have faded (the slow swirl of time) but not entirely gone. Yet.

What is the purpose of these memories being retained in the inner recesses of our brains? (Watch Pixar’s fabulous Inside Out to know more!) Do they serve as reminders so that we do not make the same mistakes again?